I am a Professor of Biology at Portland State University and have served as an academic researcher for the past fourteen years. I received my BS at the University of Vermont, my PhD from Stanford University and was an EMBO fellow at the University of Paris, France. I began my career as a professor at Mississippi State University and moved our laboratory to Portland in 2005. My research program focuses on the fundamental process of cancer and genome stability and our results have been published in Science, EMBO, and several of the leading scientific journals. I currently serve as a review panelist at the National Science Foundation, NIH, and NASA. Research in our laboratory focuses upon the fundamental "rules" which operate to maintain genomic stability in the cell. During cellular replication, whether in bacterial or human cells, each chromosome is processively replicated in its exact linear order until the precise point when the genomic template has been duplicated. As our research focuses on questions fundamental to aging and cancer, we emphasize the ways in which the fidelity of this process is regulated and conserved between E. coli and mammalian systems. Through these studies, we hope to understand how this normally faithful process of duplication can sometimes become less than perfect. Our recent research has concentrated upon the specific questions of how DNA replication recovers following DNA damage.